


Something Wild and Improbable

by vyatka



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, First Kiss, Surrealism, big deer energy, gotta always give these two an edgy twist, kind of a predictable ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-24 11:57:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15630225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: Among the Winter Soldier's repertoire of impressive skills, napping like a unicorn in a virgin's lap is not supposed to be one of them.





	Something Wild and Improbable

It was possible that the Winter Soldier was the way he was because he had been made that way - unpredictable, by turns agreeable and incorrigible, immune to insults but deeply susceptible to praise - an imprecise collision of arrogance and self-loathing and gentleness and ruthless violence. The Black Widow personally believed he had been born like this. Whenever that had been. 

He likes her. She knows that. She's known him for enough time to watch the ice slough off of him, and there's a pleasant personality underneath. Sunny, almost, when it can be coaxed out. 

The Winter Soldier, unlike Natasha, is someone you have to allow to come to you. Moving too quickly makes him suspicious. 

Natasha likes to think she's earned at least some of his trust. This is the first time he's ever dozed in her presence. Or anyone's presence. It's flattering in a way that makes her throat close. His eyes aren't closed all the way, and when she bends she can see the glint of light reflected off of his retinas. He is breathing slowly, though, and his head is heavy in her lap, and Natasha is certain that even if he's not quite asleep, he's close enough to be vulnerable. It's brave of him to trust her like that, resting his head on thighs she's killed with, but not for that reason. It would be easy for her to report him for this. Among the Winter Soldier's repertoire of impressive skills, napping like a unicorn in a virgin's lap is not supposed to be one of them. 

Her thumb feathers across his jaw. 

Just like that, the Soldier is awake. One eye glances open, then the other one, and he's pulling up and away from her in the next moment, yawning. 

The spell is broken. 

The Soldier stretches, blinking blearily. The plates in his arm whirr like muscles. 

"Hey, sleepy," Natasha says lightly. 

Maybe his defenses are down, coming out of his drowsing state. His eyebrows perk, endearing, and he smiles at her. He's so beautiful. She's so beautiful, too, but it's not the same, not really. 

The sky is still gray. A stag the size of a giraffe is nibbling on the power lines. The Soldier stands up, moves to the window, and the Black Widow, behind him, folds her arms over his shoulders. He leans into it. She rests her cheek against him. 

It's disconcerting to think about where they are. Natasha can't even remember, exactly, how they got here. When she tries to remember, her brain doesn't supply what actually happened, more like a blurry version of what it thinks might have happened. 

Natasha knows they're messing around in her mind. The Soldier might not know. His state of being swings in and out. Natasha has seen his accent change on a dime without his knowledge. What he knows about himself ranges from "nothing" to "very specific yet possibly fake memory from decades before". He's mistaken her for someone else twice, and when probed became too distressed to answer. 

The stag outside has legs like stilts and its head is big enough that it blocks out the window when it passes by. The Soldier is expressionless as its huge green eye passes over him. Natasha doesn't look. 

 ***

It is some time later, after the rain stops, that they leave. The giant stag leaves first; it's like waiting for the moose in your driveway to move along. Not all dangerous things are carnivorous. 

They unplug the car, pile into it - Natasha drives - and that's it. 

They drive through someone else's nightmare. The Soldier snorts. "Stupid thing to be afraid of." 

By now, Natasha knows the Soldier well enough to know that he doesn't really think that. Occasionally he just says things. Silence must weigh on him in a way that it doesn't on her; she senses his discomfort. He looks out the window, where they are driving through someone else's cool blue dream, now, that consists of nothing but a low hum and a mist the color of bottled lagoon water. A flower drifts by. Blue roses don't exist in reality. In a child's dreamscape (and Natasha assumes it's a child, maybe even a baby, because adults never dream anything so...pleasantly marine) anything is possible.

They won't be here for long, though. As always, there's a destination. 

 ***

The Soldier kissed her. That is probably the cause for the sudden awkwardness between them. Ordinarily, they work like cogs in a machine. A smooth, easy machine. But he kissed her before he fell asleep in her lap. 

It wasn't even a  _good_ kiss. 

Natasha's scale of what makes a kiss good may well be broken, she points out to herself. She has kissed ugly old politicians, and eager skinny young men with access to ugly old politician's offices. She has kissed other women. She has kissed handsome men. She has kissed bald men, men with enough hair to make her mouth feel full of it and at risk for a hairball. A kiss is almost the same thing as a handshake to her. 

It went like this: 

The Soldier and the Widow are propped against the walls, eating. She tosses a cherry at his mouth. He catches it by the stem and accidentally catches his lip, too, and swears. 

"Pathetic," Natasha says, smiling. Echoing his own drill-sergeant voice, she says: "Again, cadet." 

He sucks on his lip. The next cherry hits him in the cheek. 

"The Winter Soldier's reflexes are down," she teases. She throws another. They're going to run out of cherries. 

He scoops up the one that hit him in the cheek with his flesh hand. Natasha notices the thoughtful way he's looking at her, eyes all the way open, and his lip bleeding, still. 

She licks her lips. 

Possible he assumes that moving too quickly will startle her, because certainly it would startle him. Natasha is caught between amusement and confusion, watching him. The Winter Soldier is something thought of as unfaltering. He moves gracelessly from across the room to her side, sits down so they're shoulder to shoulder. 

 _I should have a cigarette,_ thinks Natasha. It would be easier to seem coy, aloof, if she had a cigarette. When she is out there, playing someone else, with the bald men and the politicians, she often has a cigarette. Young woman with a cigarette: mysterious, unreadable. Young woman without a cigarette: just a young woman. 

The Soldier kisses her with his bleeding lips. 

Natasha is disappointed by how mechanical her response is. She opens her mouth, closes her eyes, makes a small noise in the back of her throat. It's not sensual, only play-sensual. Trained response. 

Cherries on his breath, salt on her skin. 

If the Soldier is faking, he's better at it than her, he comes off so hesitantly. Just lips, first. Soft and warm and sweet. Then he deepens it. HE touches her arm, she lifts it to hook around his neck and pull him in, and he shivers, and she nibbles his lip, and abruptly the Soldier gasps and Natasha doesn't even have time to decide if she liked it before he pulls away. Then he falls asleep, either because time works strangely here or because he wants to avoid emotional difficulty. 

 _Did_ she like it? 

Now, she touches her lips. 

 ***

The place looks like nothing from the outside. It looks like a tiny little house, ramshackle, crumbling, graffitied. Splinters and nails stick out of it like porcupine spines. As they approach, the ground sloshes from dusty to marshy, and by the time they reach what passes for the door, they're ankle-deep in sickly green water and floating flora. It seeps through their theoretically waterproof boots and through their socks and into their skin. The setting sun arcs red behind their car, which is parked back where it's dry. It looks like an eye. 

The Soldier pushes on the door. In true penny dreadful fashion, it opens with a foreboding creak. 

They step through.

The place doesn't rearrange itself visibly. It exists dually, as both what it is from the inside and what it is from the outside, and what it is from the inside is a hall. 

A museum hall, poorly lit. 

The Soldier shakes snowflakes and dust particles out of his hair. "This place is full of the dead." The acoustics magnify his voice; he could have said it right in her ear. 

Natasha says nothing. 

On either side are exhibits behind glass. They're dreams, technically - but the dreams considered too dangerous to drift loose, so they're here, behind glass, wrestled down and pumped full of formaldehyde. 

On the left, an exhibit space plastered with warnings has a little girl in it. She's five, Natasha estimates. Maybe six. Whatever her age, there's no gore about her, her expression is serene, Natasha doesn't know what it is about her that would be so heartstoppingly terrifying if she was released, and yet if she's here, she's the deepest fear at the bottom of someone's skull. 

"Is that it?" she whispers, pointing with her elbow. 

The Soldier glances, wandering ahead. "No. Don't think so." 

On the other side is an old woman, liplessly severe. Her ribs gape open. The Soldier dismisses that one, too. 

As they continue: an exhibit that is nothing but dirt. An entire cell of dirt. "Someone was buried alive," the Soldier muses. 

A pack of wild dogs. The largest one's teeth are longer than Natasha's hands. Something inside of her wants to avoid its wet yellow gaze, glass or not. 

A little boy stands alone in a deserted street at dusk. 

An IED. 

A horrible insectid creature brandishes its mandibles. Its eyes are plastic, and many. They glitter. Vaguely the thing resembles a fly, if flies were ten feet tall and horrible. Natasha has a wild urge to smash the glass just to see what happens. 

They keep going. The Soldier slips his hand into hers, and Natasha is suddenly overcome with tenderness. Maybe it's being surrounded by nightmares, but he doesn't want to be alone. 

_I don't want to lose this._

A board of directors. The scene isn't well-lit - the single light shines off the sleek hair of the woman closest to the glass. The Soldier looks coldly at her and moves on. 

Another nameless horror made of spines and raw skin. 

Legs. Nothing else. Stacks and stacks of female legs. 

Unicorns. Unicorns? 

And snow. 

Natasha almost walks past it, and would have if the Soldier hadn't halted in his tracks and hauled her back. "It's not here." 

She raises a brow. 

"It - it isn't here," the Soldier rasps. He lets go of her hand to touch the glass, which is too bad. "It's gone." 

"Fuck," says Natasha. She doesn't say  _it can't be,_ because she's lived long enough to know that that never applies. What it means, though, is now a concern. "So it's loose?" 

"I don't know." He presses his hands to his temples. "I can't remember what it was. The nightmare." 

The diorama is just a landscape of snow. The painted backdrop is more snow against an iron sky, and high on the wall is a tiny building, all of it clearly missing something. Every other exhibit has a centerpiece. 

"It's gone," he repeats. "It's not here." 

Well, it goes without saying, if the nightmare isn't here, they can't kill it. A dream is difficult to destroy even when it's been stuffed, mounted, and sealed off. Roaming loose in the hall, which goes on forever and ever, a continuous expansion of worst fears and dreadful unreality, even  _finding_ it, let alone killing it, will be impossible. Like all heavy disappointments, it hadn't laid in yet. There was still the moment of denial. Staring at the empty snow exhibit, wondering if maybe he was wrong, if that was all there was, or if the nightmare subject itself would uncurl from the ceiling like a spider or a bat and present itself for killing. Natasha can feel the upset in the air. He wanted to kill it. 

At least it won't make it out of the hall, ever. It won't be able to get past the door. 

They wait for another long moment, and there's nothing. 

"Let's go." She takes his hand again. He lets her. 

 ***

 It is Natasha, and not the Soldier, who is unsentimental about failures. So it is Natasha, and not the Soldier, who starts thinking of ways to improve the situation. Not catch the nightmare - no one could do that when they didn't know what it was and it was lost in a pocket of the universe that may or may not exist - but do something to rectify the loss. Their entire purpose in killing the nightmare was to keep danger out, so it makes sense that they can do something else to keep danger out. Where they are? There are plenty of things to kill. 

She knows it won't be the same to him. She knows that what he wanted was to track down his horrible dream that he was sure was dangerous enough to be locked in the dread hall, but a loss is a loss, and even dogs know when to let things go. 

His mood settles somewhere between angry and bewildered. Natasha, still holding his hand, her mind whirring like his arm - even tampered with, even fuzzy and blurred, it works so well when something is wrong - guides him back past the other exhibits and to the door. 

"Don't worry," she says, stepping out of the door. She can see a feral dog has come to sniff around the tires of their car; it's full dark out, now. She begins the sloshy trek back to it, and is halfway there before she realizes he didn't follow her out. 

He's probably sulking. Natasha sighs, dramatic. 

She sloshes back, pushes on the wood - "Soldier?" 

He is nowhere to be found. She doesn't see him at all. Natasha, despite dreading the idea of being inside alone, steps back inside. The door swings shut behind her. Alone in the silence, she looks for him, only to find that the exhibits have rearranged. She recognizes nothing. 

Her heart sinks. 

A silent step on the floor. "Soldier?" she calls again. 

She suddenly thinks again about the kiss. Whether it was good. Whether she would do it again. Not that it matters anymore. Natasha stands there alone. The building didn't let him leave. 

The building didn't let him leave. 

Maybe that's for the best. She turns to go, shaking her head, oddly calm. She can't be angry. The place is only doing its job.

It has to keep the horrors in. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Strange the Dreamer_ by Laini Taylor: 
> 
> _"You're a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."_
> 
> The giant stag is based off of [this artwork](http://dappermouth.tumblr.com/post/167355003576/you-can-hear-them-in-the-static) by Dappermouth. 
> 
> If you liked this, please kudos and/or comment! If you didn't like this, that's fine, please have a nice day and do not tell me. 
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](http://soldatka.tumblr.com/).


End file.
